Graph 1: Weighted proportion (%) Line Chart of Multivitamin Intake by State and Year

This facet-wrap linear chart shows the weighted proportion (%) of multivitamin intake trend (no intake per week, less than daily per week, and every day per week) throughout the years of 2017 to 2022. This is also then faceted by the States that we are looking at for this study so we can see the multivitamin intake trend for each state. From this graph alone, we can see that for every state, most people do not take multivitamins over taking any amount/taking it every day. However, from this plot we can also see that for some states like Wisconsin (WI) and Vermont (VT), there seemed to be more of those who took Vitamins everyday per week by the end of 2022.

interactive_vitamin

Descriptive Table 1: Exposure and Characteristics of the Women Sampled

Using the package datatable(), the table shows the weighted percentages of not only the vitamin intake but characteristics like BMI, Income level, Race/ethnicity, Education level, and behaviors like Smoking and Drinking. Through this table, you are able to get an insight on the characteristics of the women who surveyed and participated in this surveillance study.

datatable(table1_weighted_df, 
          options = list(pageLength = 47,  
                         autoWidth = TRUE, 
                         scrollX = TRUE),  
          rownames = FALSE)    

Dataset description

PRAMS, also known as Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, is an annual population-based surveillance system that surveys a random sample of pregnant women picked from all the live birth certificates available. Currently there are 9 phases ranging from years 1988 to current, while this specific project consisted of the datasets from phase 8 (2017 - 2022), containing observations from states:“AL”, “CO”, “DE”, “KS”, “ME”, “MA”, “MI”, “MO”, “MT”,“NJ”, “NM”, “YC”, “ND”, “PA”, “PR”, “SD”, “UT”, “VT”,“VA”, “WA”, “WI”, “WY” and 249970 observations with 486 variables.

This research is ongoing as regression models are being compared and improved as we get our research paper draft ready. A few challenges that we faced were the fact that not all the jurisdiction were able to release the data every year because they were not able to meet the response threshold. For this reason our sample size was reduced to all the observations from 2017-2022 and around 20 states which may reduce the power of this project. However, we’d like to argue that the dataset was large enough for this concern to not pose a great threat to the analysis. In addition, while taking the results in, we also had to understand that the results could be an over or underestimate due to biases related to the data collection method being a survey. Another restriction to consider is that the Vitamin variable was the overarching name for folic acid, multivitamin, or prenatal intake prior to the pregnancy. We were mostly interested in folic acid/multivitamin intake so a portion of the women within the proportion of those who took vitamins may have taken prenatal vitamins - thus the proportion resulted from our analysis may be an overestimation of the true intake.

Overall, the PRAMS research serves as an informative tool rather than a definitive conclusion. While the findings are not conclusive, they provide valuable insights that researchers can build upon to explore further. In particular, these results could be used to investigate multivitamin intake trends in relation to birth defect rates across the states examined in this project. Future research may help uncover potential correlations and inform public health strategies to improve maternal and infant health outcomes.